Work deploys a network of techniques and effects that make it seem
inevitable and, where possible, pleasurable. Central among these effects
is the diffusion of responsibility for the baseline need for work:
everyone accepts, because everyone knows, that everyone must have a job.
Bosses as much as subordinates are slaves to the larger servomechanisms
of work, which are spectral and non-localizable. In effect, work is the
largest self-regulation system the universe has so far manufactured,
subjecting each of us to a generalized panopticon shadow under which we
dare not do anything but work, or at least seem to be working, lest we
fall prey to an obscure disapproval all the more powerful for being so.

The downturn of 2008 proved every anti-capitalist critic right.
The system was bloated and spectral, borrowing on its borrowing,
insuring its insurance, and skimming profit on every transaction. The
FIRE sector--finance, insurance, real estate--had created the worst
market bubble since the South Sea Company's 1720 collapse, and
nobody should have been surprised when that latest party balloon of
capital burst. And yet everybody was. It was as if a collective delusion
had taken hold of the world's 7 billion souls, the opposite of
group paranoia: an unshakable false belief in the reality of the system.
The trouble was that, in the wake of the crisis, awareness of the
system's untenability changed nothing.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The government bailout schemes--known as stimulus packages, a
phrase that belongs in the pages of porn--effectively socialized some
failing industries, saddling their collapse on taxpayers, even as it
handed over billions of dollars to the people responsible for the bloat
in the first place. Unemployment swept through vulnerable sectors in
waves of layoffs and cutbacks, and "downturn" became an
inarguable excuse for all manner of cost-saving action. Not only did
nothing change in the system, the system emerged stronger than ever, now
just more tangled in the enforced tax burdens and desperate job-seeking
of individuals.

Capitalism is probably beyond large-scale change, but we should
not waste this opportunity to interrogate its most fundamental idea:
work. A curious sub-genre of writing washed up on the shore of this
crisis, celebrating manual labour and tracing globalized foodstuffs and
consumer products back to their origins in toil. (1) The problem with
these efforts, despite their charms, is that they do not resist the idea
of work in the first instance. The pleasures of craft or intricacies of
production have their value; but they are no substitute for resistance.
And no matter what the inevitabilists say, resistance to work is not
futile. It may not overthrow capitalism, but it does highlight essential
things about our predicament--philosophy's job ever.

The values of work are still dominant in far too much of life;
indeed, these values have exercised their own kind of linguistic genius
in creating a host of phrases, terms, and labels that bolster, rather
than challenge, the dominance of work. Ideology is carried forward
effectively by many vehicles, including narrative and language. The
vocabulary of work is itself a kind of Trojan Horse within language
itself, naturalizing and so making invisible some of the very dubious,
if not evil, assumptions of the work idea. This is all the more true
when economic times are bad, since work then becomes itself a scarce
commodity. That makes people anxious, and the anxiety is taken up by
work: Don't fire me! I don't want to be out of work! Work
looms larger than ever, the assumed natural condition whose
"loss" makes the non-working individual by definition a
loser.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

BERTRAND RUSSELL'S wry little book In Praise of Idleness
(1932) is in fact more incisive about work than about idling, which he
seems to view as the mere absence of work (what I would instead call
slacking). Russell usefully defines work this way:

Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or
near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter;
second,
telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill
paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid.

Russell goes on to note that "The second kind is capable of
indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but
those who give advice as to what orders should be given." This
second-order advice is what is meant by bureaucracy; and if two opposite
kinds of advice are given at the same time, then it is known as
politics. The skill needed for this last kind of work "is not
knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of
the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of
advertising."

Very little needs to be added to this analysis except to note
something crucial which Russell appears to miss: the greatest work of
work is to disguise its essential nature. The grim ironists of the Third
Reich were exceptionally forthright when they fixed the evil, mocking
maxim Arbeit Macht Frei--"work shall make you free"--over the
gates at Dachau and Auschwitz. We can only conclude that this was their
idea of a sick joke, and that their ideological commitments were not
with work at all, but with despair and extermination.

The real ideologists of work are never so transparent, nor so
wry. But they are clever, because their genius is, in effect, to fix a
different maxim over the whole of the world: work is fun! Or, to push
the point to its logical conclusion, it's not work if it
doesn't feel like work. And so celebrated workaholics excuse
themselves from what is in fact an addiction, and in the same stroke
implicate everyone else for not working hard enough. "Work is the
grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset
mankind," said that barrel of fun, Thomas Carlyle. "Nothing is
really work unless you would rather be doing something else," added
J. M. Barrie, perhaps destabilizing his position on Peter Pan. And even
the apparently insouciant Noel Coward argued that "Work is much
more fun than fun." Really? Perhaps he meant to say, "what
most people consider fun." But still. Claims like these just lay
literary groundwork for the Fast Company work/play manoeuvre of the
1990s or the current, more honest, compete-or-die productivity
language.

Work deploys a network of techniques and effects that make it
seem inevitable and, where possible, pleasurable. Central among these
effects is the diffusion of responsibility for the baseline need for
work: everyone accepts, because everyone knows, that everyone must have
a job. Bosses as much as subordinates are slaves to the larger
servomechanisms of work, which are spectral and non-localizable. In
effect, work is the largest self-regulation system the universe has so
far manufactured, subjecting each of us to a generalized panopticon
shadow under which we dare not do anything but work, or at least seem to
be working, lest we fall prey to an obscure disapproval all the more
powerful for being so. The work idea functions in the same manner as a
visible surveillance camera, which need not even be hooked up to
anything. No, let's go further: there need not even be a camera.
Like the prisoners in the perfected version of Bentham's
fiber-utilitarian jail, workers need no overseer because they watch
themselves. There is no need for actual guards; when we submit to work,
we are guard and guarded at once.

Offshoots of this system are somewhat more visible to scrutiny,
and so tend to fetch the largest proportion of critical objection. A
social theorist will challenge the premises of inevitability in market
forces, or wonder whether economic "laws" are anything more
than self-serving generalizations. These forays are important, but they
leave the larger inevitabilities of work mostly untouched. In fact, such
critical debates tend to reinforce the larger ideological victory of
work, because they accept the baseline assumptions of it even in their
criticisms. Thus does work neutralize, or indeed annex, critical energy
from within the system. The cultural figure we call the slacker is the
tragic hero here, a small-scale version of a Greek protagonist. In his
mild resistance--long stays in the mailroom, theft of office supplies,
forgery of timecards, ostentatious toting of empty files--the slacker
cannot help but sustain the system. This is resistance, but of the wrong
sort; it really is futile, because the system, whatever its official
stance, loves slackers. They embody the work idea in their very
objection. (2)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

NONE of that will be news to anyone who has ever been within the
demand-structure of a workplace. What is less clear is why we put up
with it, why we don't resist more robustly. As Max Weber noted in
his analysis of leadership under capitalism, any ideology must, if it is
to succeed, give people reasons to act. It must offer a narrative of
identity to those caught within its ambit, otherwise they will not
continue to perform, and renew, its reality. As with most truly
successful ideologies, the work idea latches on to a very basic feature
of human existence: our character as social animals jostling for
position. But Freud was precipitate when he argued, in Civilization and
Its Discontents, that all human action was motivated by this narcissism
of minor differences, the tiny distinctions between winner and loser. In
fact, the recipe for action is that narcissism plus some tale of why the
differences matter.

No tale can be too fanciful to sustain this outcome. Serbs and
Croats may engage in bloody warfare over relatively trivial genetic or
geographical difference, provided both sides accept the story of what
the difference means. In the case of work, the evident genius lies in
reifying what is actually fluid, namely social position and
"elite" status within hierarchies. The most basic material
conditions of work--office size and position, number of windows,
attractiveness of assistant, cut of suit--are simultaneously the rewards
and the ongoing indicators of status within this competition. Meanwhile,
the competition sustains itself backward via credentialism: that is, the
accumulation of degrees and certificates from "prestigious"
schools and universities which, though often substantively unrelated to
the work at hand, indicate appropriate elite grooming. These
credentialist back-formations confirm the necessary feeling that a
status outcome is earned, not merely conferred. Position without an
attendant narrative of merit would not satisfy the ideological demand
for action to seem meaningful.

The result is entrenched rather than circulating elites. The
existence of elites is, in itself, neither easily avoidable nor
obviously bad. The so-called Iron Law of Oligarchy states that
"every field of human endeavour, every kind of organization, will
always be led by a relatively small elite." This oligarchic
tendency answers demands for efficiency and direction, but more
basically it is agreeable to humans on a socio-evolutionary level. We
like elite presence in our undertakings, and tend to fall into line
behind it. But the narrative of merit in elite status tends to thwart
circulation of elite membership, and encourage the false idea that such
status is married to "intrinsic" qualities of the individual.
In reality, the status is a kind of collective delusion, not unlike the
one that sustains money, another key narrative of the system.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At this stage, it is possible to formulate
"laws"--actually law-like generalizations--about the structure
of a work-idea company, which is any company in thrall to the work idea,
including (but not limited to) bureaucracies. Parkinson's,
Pournelle's, and Moore's Laws of Bureaucracy may be viewed as
derivatives of the Iron Law, understood as ways in which we can
articulate how the system sustains itself and its entrenched elite.
While expressly about bureaucracies, these generalizations speak to the
inescapable bureaucratic element in all workplaces, even those that try
to eschew that element. In short, they explicate the work idea even as
that idea works to keep its precise contours implicit.

Parkinson's Law is minimalist in concept but wide in
application. It states: "There need be little or no relationship
between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be
assigned." This despite the lip service often paid to the norm of
efficiency. Parkinson also identified two axiomatic underlying forces
responsible for the growth in company staff: (1] "An official wants
to multiply subordinates, not rivals"; and (2) "Officials make
work for each other." The second may be more familiar as the
Time-Suck Axiom, which states that all meetings must generate further
meetings. And so at a certain threshold we may observe that meetings
are, for all intents and purposes, entirely self-generating, like
consciousness. They do not need the humans who "hold" them at
all, except to be present during the meeting and not doing anything
else.

Examining the company structure at one level higher, that is, in
the motivation of the individuals, the science fiction writer Jerry
Pournelle proposed a theory he referred to as Pournelle's Iron Law
of Bureaucracy. It states that "In any bureaucracy, the people
devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control
and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to
accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated
entirely." In other words, just as meetings become self-generating,
so too does the company structure as a whole. The company becomes a norm
of its own, conceptually distinct from whatever the company makes, does,
or provides.

Once this occurs--most obvious in the notion of "company
loyalty," with the required "team-building" weekends,
ball caps, golf shirts, and logos--there will be positive incentives for
position-seekers to neglect or even ignore other values ostensibly
supported by the company. More seriously, if Pournelle's Law is
correct, then these position-seekers will become the dominant
position-holders, such that any norms outside "the company"
will soon fade and disappear. The company is now a self-sustaining
evolutionary entity, with no necessary goals beyond its own continued
existence, to which end the desires of individual workers can be
smoothly assimilated.

Moore's Laws take the analysis even further. If a
bureaucracy is a servomechanism, its ability to process an error signal,
and so generate corrective commands and drive the system away from
error, is a function of the depth of the hierarchy. But instead of
streamlining hierarchy and so making error-correction easier,
bureaucracies do the opposite: they deepen the hierarchy, adding new
error sensors but lessening the system's ability to respond to
them. Large bureaucracies are inherently noisy systems whose very
efforts to achieve goals make them noisier. Thus, Moore concludes, (1)
large bureaucracies cannot possibly achieve their goals; as a result,
(2) they will thrash about, causing damage.

He suggests five further laws. The power wielded by bureaucracies
will tend to attach above-mean numbers of sociopaths to their ranks.
Hence (3) large bureaucracies are evil. Because the mechanism of the
system increases noise as it attempts to eliminate it, system members in
contact with the rest of reality will be constrained by rigid, though
self-defeating, rules. Thus (4) large bureaucracies are heartless. They
are also (5) perverse, subordinating stated long-term goals to the
short-term ambitions of the humans within the system; (6) immortal,
because their non-achievement of goals makes them constantly replace
worn-out human functionaries with new ones; and finally (7) boundless,
since there is no theoretical limit to the increased noise, size, and
complexity of an unsuccessful system.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So much for elites looking backward, justifying their place in
the work-idea, and finding ever novel ways of expanding without
succeeding. Pournelle's and Moore's laws highlight how, now
looking forward, the picture is considerably more unnerving. The routine
collection of credentials, promotions, and employee-of-the-month honours
in exchange for company loyalty masks a deeper existential
conundrum--which is precisely what it is meant to do.

Consider: It is an axiom of status anxiety that the competition
for position has no end--save, temporarily, when a scapegoat is found.
The scapegoat reaffirms everyone's status, however uneven, because
he is beneath all. Hence many work narratives are miniature
blame-quests. We come together as a company to fix guilt on one of our
number, who is then publicly shamed and expelled. Jones filed a report
filled with errors! Smith placed an absurdly large order, and the
company is taking a bath! This makes us all feel better, and enhances
our sense of mission, even if it produces nothing other than its own
spectacle.

Blame-quests work admirably on their small scale. At larger
scales, the narrative task is harder. What is the company for? What does
it do? Here, as when a person confronts mortality, we teeter on the
abyss. The company doesn't actually do much of anything. It is not
for anything important. The restless forward movement of companies--here
at Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net, we are always moving on--is work's
version of the Hegelian Bad Infinite, the meaningless nothing of empty
everything. There is no point to what is being done, but it must be done
anyway. The boredom of the average worker, especially in a large
corporation, is the walking illustration of this meaninglessness. But
boredom can lower productivity, so a large part of work's energy is
expended in finding ways to palliate the boredom that is the necessary
outcome of work in order to raise productivity: a sort of credit-default
swap of the soul. Workaholism is the narcotic version of this, executed
within the individual himself. The workaholic colonizes his own despair
at the perceived emptiness of life--its non-productivity--by filling it
in with work. (3)

It can be no surprise that the most searching critic of work,
Karl Marx, perceived this Hegelian abyss at the heart of work. But
Marx's theory of alienated labour, according to which our efforts
and eventually ourselves become commodities bought and sold for profit
to others, is just one note in a sustained chorus of opposition and
resistance to work. "Never work," the Situationist Guy Debord
commanded, articulating the baseline of opposition. Another Situationist
slogan, the famous graffito of May 1968, reminded us that the order and
hardness of the urban infrastructure masked a playful, open-ended sense
of possibility that was even more fundamental: Sous les paves, la plage!
Under the paving-stones, the beach!

Between Marx and Debord lies the great, neglected Georges Sorel,
a counter-enlightenment and even counter-cultural voice whose influence
can be seen to run into the likes of Debord, Frantz Fanon, and Che
Guevara; but also Timothy Leafy, Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey. Like many
other radical critics, Sorel perceived the emptiness of the liberal
promise of freedom once it becomes bound up with regimentation and
bourgeoisification of everyday life. Sorel was a serial enthusiast,
moving restlessly from cause to cause: a socialist, a Dreyfusard, an
ascetic, an anti-Dreyfusard. In the first part of the twentieth century
he settled on the labour movement as his home and proposed a general
strike that would (in the words of Isaiah Berlin, who had tremendous
respect for this against-the-grain thinker):

call for the total overthrow of the entire abominable world of
calculation, profit and loss, the treatment of human beings and
their powers as commodities, as material for bureaucratic
manipulation, the world of illusory consensus and social harmony,
or economic and sociological experts no matter what master they
serve, who treat men as subjects of statistical calculations,
malleable "human material, forgetting that behind such
statistics
there are living human beings."

In other words, the whole modern shebang.

We might wonder, first, why such resistance is recurrently
necessary but also, second, why it seems ever to fail. The answer lies
in the evolutionary fact of language upgrade. In common with all
ideologies, the work-idea understands that that victory is best which is
achieved soonest, ideally before the processes of conscious thought are
allowed to function. And so it is here that language emerges as the
clear field of battle. Language acquisition is crucial to our
evolutionary success because it aids highly complex coordination of
action. But that same success hinges also on misdirection, deception,
control, and happy illusion carried out by language, because these too
make for coordinated action. Thus the upgrade is at the same time a
downgrade: language allows us to distinguish between appearance and
reality, but it also allows some of us to persuade others that
appearances are realities. If there were no distinction, this would not
matter; indeed, it would not be possible. Deception can only work if
there is such a thing as truth, as Socrates demonstrated in the first
book of Plato's Republic.

Jargon, slogans, euphemisms and terms of art are all weapons in
the upgrade/downgrade tradition. We might class them together under the
technical term bullshit, as analyzed by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. The
routine refusal to speak with regard to the truth is called bullshit
because evasion of normativity produces a kind of ordure, a
dissemination of garbage, the scattering of shit. This is why, as
Frankfurt reminds us, bullshit is far more threatening, and politically
evil, than lying. The bullshitter "does not reject the authority of
the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no
attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is the greater enemy
of the truth than lies are." (4)

Work language is full of bullshit. Special vigilance is needed
about work bullshit because the second-order victory of work bullshit is
that, in addition to having no regard for the truth, it passes itself
off as innocuous or even beneficial. Especially in clever hands, the
controlling elements of work are repackaged as liberatory,
counter-cultural, subversive: you're a skatepunk rebel because you
work seventy hours a week beta-testing videogames. This, we might say,
is meta-bullshit. And so--far from what philosophers might assert or
wish--this meta-bullshit and not truth is the norm governing most
coordinated human activity under conditions of capital markets. Thus
does bullshit meet, and become, filthy lucre; and of course, vice
versa.

As the work idea works itself out in language, we observe a
series of linked paradoxes in the work world: imprisonment via
inclusion; denigration via celebration; obfuscation via explanation;
conformity via distinction; failure via success; obedience via freedom;
authority via breezy coolness. The manager is positioned as an
"intellectual," a "visionary," even a
"genius." "Creatives" are warehoused and petted.
Demographics are labelled; products are categorized. Catchphrases,
acronyms, proverbs, cliches, and sports metaphors are marshalled and
deployed. Diffusion of sense through needless complexity, diffusion of
responsibility through passive constructions, and elaborate celebration
of minor achievements mark the language of work.

And so: Outsourcing. Repositioning Downsizing. Rebranding. Work
the mission statement. Push the envelope. Think outside the box. Stay in
the loop. See the forest and the trees. Note sagely that where there is
smoke there is also fire. Casual Fridays! Smartwork! Hotdesking! The
whole nine yards! Touchdown! You-topia!

These shopworn work-idea locutions have already been exposed, and
mocked, such that we may think we know our enemy all too well. But the
upgrade/downgrade is infinitely inventive. Even this glossary cannot be
considered the final word on wage-slave verbiage. If The Idler's
Glossary naively declared glossaries over, the present volume warns that
the work of language care is never over.

YOU might think, at this point, that the solution to a language
problem is a language solution. The very same inventiveness that marks
the ideology of work can be met with a wry, subversive
counterintelligence. Witness such portmanteau pun words as
"slacktivism" or "crackberry" which mock,
respectively, people who think that blogging is a form of political
action and those who are in thrall to text messages the way some people
are addicted to crack cocaine. Or observe the high linguistic style of
office-bound protagonists from Douglas Coupland's Generation X
(1991) to Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End (2007) and Ed
Park's Personal Days (2008).

These books are hilarious, and laughter is always a release. But
their humour is a sign of doom, not liberation. The "veal-fattening
pen" label applied to those carpet-sided cubicles of the open-form
office (Coupland) does nothing to change the facts of the office. Nor
does calling office-mateyness an "air family" (Coupland again)
make the false camaraderie any less spectral. Coupland was especially
inventive and dry in his generation of neologisms, but reading a bare
list of them shows the hollow heart of dread beneath the humour. (5)
Indeed, the laughs render the facts more palatable by mixing humour into
the scene of domination--a willing capitulation, consumed under the
false sign of resistance. This applies to most of what we call slacking,
a verb at least as old as 1530, when Jehan Palsgrave asked of a
task-shirking friend "Whye slacke you your busynesse
thus?"

That was the main reason we were at pains to distinguish idling
from slacking in the previous glossary. Slacking is consistent with the
work idea; it does not subvert it, merely gives in by means of evasion.
As John Kenneth Galbraith pointed out a half-century ago in The Affluent
Society (1958), such evasion is actually the pinnacle of corporate
life:

Indeed it is possible that the ancient art of evading work has been
carried in our time to its highest level of sophistication, not to
say elegance. One should not suppose that it is an accomplishment
of any particular class, occupation, or profession. Apart from the
universities where its practice has the standing of a scholarly
rite, the art of genteel and elaborately concealed idleness may
well reach its highest development in the upper executive reaches
of the modern corporation.

Galbraith's "idleness" is not to be confused with
genuine idling, of course; the "concealed" that modifies the
noun shows why. A slacking executive is no better, and also no worse,
than the lowliest clerk hiding in the mailroom to avoid a meeting. But
neither is idling, which calls for openness and joy.

And so here we confront again the Bad Infinite at the heart of
work. What is it for? To produce desired goods and services. But these
goods and services are, increasingly, the ones needed to maintain the
system itself. The product of the work system is work, and spectres such
as "profit" and "growth" are covers for the
disheartening fact that, in Galbraith's words, "[a]s a society
becomes increasingly affluent, wants are increasingly created by the
process by which they are satisfied." Which is only to echo
Marcuse's and Arendt's well-known apercus that the basic
creation of capitalism is superfluity- with the additional insight that
capitalism must then create the demand to take up such superfluity. (6)
Galbraith nails the contradiction at the heart of things: "But the
case cannot stand if it is the process of satisfying wants that creates
the wants. For then the individual who urges the importance of
production to satisfy the wants is precisely in the position of the
onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the
wheel that is propelled by his own efforts." (7)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

STILL, all is not lost. There is a gift in the excess that the
economy of work is constantly generating. Indeed, that gift is the
growing aware., ness that there is always a gift economy that operates
beneath, or beyond, the exchange economy. Any market economy is a failed
attempt to distribute goods and services exactly where they are needed
or desired, as and when they are needed and desired. That's all
markets are, despite the pathological excrescences that lately attach to
them: derivatives funds, advertising, shopping-as-leisure. If we had a
perfect market, idling would be the norm, not the exception, because
distribution would be frictionless. As Marcuse saw decades ago, most
work is the result of inefficiency, not genuine need. This is all the
more true in a FIRE-storm economy.

Paradoxically, idling is entirely consistent with
capitalism's own internal logic -which logic of course implies,
even if it never realizes, the end of capitalism. This insight turns the
Bad Infinite of work into a Good Infinite, where we may begin to see
things not as resources, ourselves not as consumers, and the world as a
site of play rather than of work.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The great Marxist and Situationist critics of work hoped that
critical theory-accurate analysis of the system's pathologies
-would change the system. The latest crisis in capitalism has shown that
it will not. But a system is made of individuals, just as a market is
composed of individual choices and transactions. Don't change the
system; change your life. Debord's "Never work" did not
go far enough. Truly understand the nature of work and its language, and
you may never even think of work again!

Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all
other ways of existing, at the same time as workers have become
superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization,
automated and digital production have so progressed that they have
almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in
the manufacture of any product. We are living the paradox of a
society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption
and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed
to distract us.

It is perhaps no surprise that the authors, viewing this
superfluous majority as set off against the self-colonization desires
for "advancement" in the compliant minority, suggest that the
current situation "introduces the risk that, in its idleness, [the
majority] will set about sabotaging the machine" (The Coming
Insurrection, pp. 46- 48).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Notes

(1) See, for example, Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft
(Penguin, 2009) and Main de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
(Pantheon, 2009). Andrew Ross summarizes the political puzzle posed by
these books: "It is an unfortunate comment on the generous
intellects of these two authors that they do not see fit to acknowledge,
in their respective surveys of working life, the nobility of those who
resist" ("Love Thy Labor," Bookforum, Fall 2009, p.
16).

(2) Corinne Maier's otherwise excellent Bonjour Laziness
(Orion, 2005; trans. Greg Mosse), especially on the language of work, is
unstable on this point. She acknowledges the work system is impervious
to challenge, and yet finally urges: "rather than a 'new
man', be a blob, a leftover, stubbornly resisting the pressure to
conform, impervious to manipulation. Become the grain of sand that
seizes up the whole machine, the sore thumb" (p. 117). This
confused message would seem to indicate insufficient grasp of the
slacker/idler distinction.

(3) More extreme measures can be imagined. In J.G. Ballard's
novel Super-Cannes (2000), bored executives at a sleek French corporate
park are advised by a company psychiatrist that the solution to their
lowered output is not psychotherapy but psychopathology: once they begin
nocturnal sorties of violence on immigrant workers and prostitutes,
productivity rates soar.

(4) Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton University Press,
2005), a huge international bestseller which was in fact a repurposed
version of a journal article Frankfurt had published many years earlier,
included in his collection The Importance of What We Care About:
Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, 1988).

(5) See, for example, http://www.scn.org/~jonny/genx.html.

(6) Arendt famously distinguishes work, labour, and action--the
three aspects of the vita activa--in her magnum opus, .The Human
Condition (1958). In this schema, labour operates to maintain the
necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing) and is unceasing; work
fashions specific things or ends, and so is finite; and action is public
display of the self in visible doings. Work as we are discussing it in
the present essay is obscurely spread across these categories. As a
result, Arendt could indict the emptiness of a society free from
labour--the wasteland of consumer desire--but could not see how smoothly
the work idea would fold itself back into that wasteland in the form of
workaholism.

(7) Compare a more recent version of the argument, in the
nihilistic words of the Invisible Committee, a group of radical French
activists who published their antimanifesto, The Coming Insurrection, in
2009; it has been anonymously translated into English by
Semiotext(e).

MARK KINGWELL is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Toronto and the author of fifteen books, most recently Glenn Gould
(2009) in Penguin's Extraordinary Canadians series. He is working
on a book about democracy.

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